Agenda

Special agenda carried over for this meeting

Release Planning next release

Mozilla plans to remove XUL, classic extensions, and full themes by the end of 2017. While it is still unclear if the time table is realistic the future outlook is bleak.

It is unclear if the current SeaMonkey developer team can fix the upcoming build breaks fast enough to do regular releases.

SeaMonkey 2.50a1 (FF 53) is building but this may change at any time. l20n is planned for FF 53 and might disrupt l10n building again.

The consensus seems to be to do a ESR 52 cycle for the next SeaMonkey release. This would mean SeaMonkey 2.49 will become an ESR release still providing Windows XP and Vista compatibility.

Thunderbird has been ESR only since the beginning of the train model. The biggest obstacle/restriction is that no string changes are allowed.

Doing a 2.49 ESR will give the developer team a breather to fix the upcoming breaks in the mozilla source tree.

Forking the Mozilla source tree is not an option. The dev team is too small and would not be able to even fix all upcoming security bugs in a forked Gecko engine.

Release Planning mid/long term

Mid/Long term release planning was not discussed because of time constraints. It will be put on the agenda of the next status meeting.

It was suggested that we set up own builders to become more independent of Mozilla. adriank already has a working build system based on Jenkins. Ratty and ewong would like to set up one based on buildbot. No decision needed right now but this needs to be worked out.

A new build system should provide try builds and should us also enable doing automated tests again.

Discussion

Benefits for 2.49ESR as opposed to whatever is comm-release:

ESR will get security fixes for 12 months.

After that we can cherry-pick and backport stuff. FRG thinks that will give us 18+ months on ESR-49.

We want to keep XP/Vista support, plug-in support other than Flash, full themes and XUL overlay extensions for a bit longer.

It'll give us some breathing space. We can even innovate and do some feature work. We could selectively back port feature work.

But no string changes would be allowed on ESR.

[Ratty] The way Thunderbird does releases on ESR and get new string changes is to do releases on comm-beta and then copy the new strings to their ESR-L10n.

[Callek] I agree it gives some more breathing room around a release train, but as Thunderbird has noticed, doing it that way still means we need beta's, because we need to work with and track changes that are necessary for future, otherwise we're in a boat of "hey there was 100k changesets between this working esr and this broken one, what.

[Ratty] For me personally the breaking point is removal of support for XUL extensions and "Full Themes". At this point I'm going to switch my focus to ESR [FRG] The same.

Build System

Basically we need a build system that is simple but allows lets us have localised extensions.

[IanN] In an ideal world we would like to merge mozilla-ESR into comm-ESR so we have a unified repository.

This would among other things, simplify the build process,

jcranmer has been doing some testing in the Cypress twig repository but that work has stalled since jcranmer lost interest.

[FRG] Whatever is decided should be decided with TB together. I don't think we will be able to do it alone.

Will the build system we use depend on whether we join forces with TB? TB will continue to use buildbot, so the question whether we adapt to their buildbot configuration or they adapt to us.

It would it be a good idea that we come up with a basic plan of what infra we need and finalize the structure and then let Callek have a looksee?

Ratty is prepared to fork out some cash to get some independent infrastructure working.

Q: what TB are going to do about infrastructure. [Ratty] They have hired a systems architect to do the planning for their new infrastructure.

One issue that ewong is concerned about. since a lot of our current infra interact with moco-internal stuff (api tooltool and the upload servers to name a few).

We need to be able to upload those nightlies to stage (archive.m.o) and the symbol server. And eventually we'll need to be able to upload data to "Balrog" (the update server) which we'd currently need to upload that data to our own update server.

So we either ask them to whitelist those external ips or we duplicate the kind of setup they have.

FRG asks if we could put a donation page into the SeaMonkey 2.48 first start page. Instead of the regular hello new release page we could redirect to another page on seamonkey-project.org.

Action Items

(who needs to do what that hasn't been recorded in a bug)
We should assign people to the open items.

NEW

—

OPEN

Mozilla plans to check in l20n early in the Firefox 53 release cycle. Unclear what this means for comm-central and the build configs. Needs to be monitored.

in light of this and other changes in 52+, releasing 2.49.x off 52 ESR becomes an increasingly attractive option

Google announced V4 of the safebrowsing api. No actions currently needed. Firefox adds support for it in bug 1167038.

Status of the SeaMonkey Buildbot Master and Tree

Linux64 Nightly: bug 1275215 is still open but Linux is building most of the time.

Linux64 build: bug 1275218 is still open but Linux is building most of the time.

Windows building on the loaner works.

Various l10n and other bugs bug 1293943 which might also impact the release schedule. Currently no clear overview available.

Note for this session: due to some weird horkage on the master (my bad), the master had to be restarted(and by restarted, I meant the buildbot process and not the system). The following status isn't updated as I don't have actual information as to the actual status. (Though, I know for sure Trunk is green as that's the only tree that was built since I had restarted the master).

CZ langpacks seem to be disabled by default, so that needs to be sorted.

Callek: Regarding the windows systems, sadly no progress yet. I'm hopeful we can get done sooner than later, I'm realistic expecting it won't be any time soon.

Ewong will set up a cron job to do semi regular builds on the loaner machine. He is still unable to set a timeframe for the next release. The moco build system is constantly changing. The MAC builders can be updated to OSX 10.9. He needs to consult with Callek first about this. He has trouble building the Windows version on the loaner.

Windows nightly trunk builds are unavailable due to various bugs such as bug 1092468 and bug 1108970. Migrating our Windows builders to Win2008 and our compiler toolchain to VS2015 would likely solve this and other bustages. Ewong made substantial progress here and building works on the loaner.

There are also some upcoming changes to l10n build system in Q1 2015 (bug 1107635).

Setting the default search engine no longer works. This is covered in bug 1265881 and will not be fixed for 2.46. It needs to be added to the release notes.

bug 1231349 is currently causing problems building l10n versions. Currently only a workaround exists.

bug 1279851 CRASH when benchmarking webm decoding performance on YouTube page. Fixed in bug 1279348 which is in 2.47+. If possible it should be included in a special m-r SeaMonkey release branch for 2.46.

SeaMonkey 2.48 Release TBA.

Ready for L10N signoffs. Changesets to be provided by Callek.

[rsx1m] GTK2 vs GTK3: comm-beta is still on gtk3; it appears that there is no movement in the gtk3-related bugs, thus I think we should stick with gtk2 at least for c-r until those are resolved or gtk2 is retired by a significant distro.

Lightning it needs a patch for l10n which doesn't exist yet. It was during the repack where the wget failed.

We are looking for a new place to host the Addon Compatibility Listings for the Add-on Converter in order to make it easy to maintain and to serve as the main database for the AMO browsing extension in the future. The details are in this post.

Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkeyhttp://addonconverter.fotokraina.com/This tool goes a little further beyond simply modifying install.rdf - it also identifies a few more other things in the code that are Firefox or Thunderbird specific and attempts to change them. Of course, not all extensions can be ported so easily to SeaMonkey since there's only so much an automated tool like that can do.

Lemon Juice continues to improve his already impressive Addon Converter. The source is now available on GitHub [4].

We are looking for a better(?) home for extension-converter pages, along with a way to track successful and conversion-failed add-ons, and respective integration into SeaMonkey by add-on or manager overlay [5], bug 1145026.

The HTML Validator extension has been updated on June 28 and again (but Beta) on July 2. The Beta version is no more Windows-only: it boasts support for W32/64, L32/64 and Mac 32/64 Universal in a single XPI. It does not officially support trunk builds but in Tonymec's experience it works with them (or at least with the "latest" 2016-06-25 tinderbox-build). It offers a choice of validators: Tidy, SGML (same algorithm as the W3C validator but client-side) or both. Caveat: The toolbar button gives no results for HTML5, you need View Source for that. See the developer's site for details.

Some warning messages might be caused by improper toolkit checking for disabled signing. See bug 1291749.

In Gecko 52 obsolete toolkit parts were removed in bug 1312143. This may cause problems with older add-ons when SeaMonkey 2,49 hits the road. The 2.49 release notes should mention it. Chatzilla and DOMi were affected and are currently being fixed.

bug 1256724 Update The Data Manager, and the Cookie Viewer so as to treat backspace and delete equivalently on Mac OS X. Took over the bug. Need to figure out some backspace problems in cookieviewer

bug 888915 Move SeaMonkey to the new JavaScript API for downloads when nsIDownloadManager is decommissioned. Unbitrotted the patch and did some changes but again get sidetracked this time by bug 1300547 and various build breakages. Started working on it again but got distracted again.

bug 1293618 "Clear History from Private Data" completely broken (only test part left). A little on the backburner.

bug 1296850 Show standard loading indicator images in tab when busy or progress attribute are set. On the backburner. Need to look at the icons.

bug 1319212 Dragging and dropping a url from the desktop onto the browser no longer works. Need to put comments from IanN into the patch.

Mostly did support stuff after 2.46 was released in the last 3 weeks and fixed some smaller build breakages.

Trying to clean up the shipped extensions build process so that they ca be included / disabled via confvars.sh. Halfway done. No bug yet.

Titbits:

No time for Sync at the moment.

Other things on my mind:

--enable-optimize=-O2 should be used for Windows release builds. Linux gcc --enable-optimize optimizes for speed. With VS2015 it optimizes for size. Resulting O2 Windows build feels a lot snappier. Will ask glandium about it.